Search results for: "Form"

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  2. Heedful of Small Dangers
     … Show respect for your breath, because it can form the basis for a lot of skillful qualities, and for those skillful qualities to make a lot of difference if you give them the chance.
  3. Stick with It
     … It’s rare that you have the peace and quiet and the opportunity to really develop the mind, to strengthen its good qualities, so that they form a good foundation for your life.
  4. Clinging & the End of Clinging
    When the Buddha formulated his first noble truth—the truth of suffering and stress—he didn’t say something useless like, “Life is suffering.” He didn’t say something vague and obvious like, “There is suffering.” He said something more specific, useful, and insightful: “Suffering is the five clinging-aggregates.” As he pointed out elsewhere, the problem isn’t with the aggregates of form … 
  5. Choosing Sides
     … Not all forms of happiness are harmonious and conducive to one another. You have to think about that basic principle, as the Buddha said: When you see that a greater happiness comes from letting go of a lesser happiness, you’ve got to let go of the lesser happiness. So while you’re sitting here meditating, you’re choosing. And you’re making important … 
  6. Getting Out of Karmic Debt
     … They form parts of your body right now. Your muscles came from the muscles of pigs and cows; your skin, from the skin of fish. In fact, in one of his early writings he said that this was the contemplation that got him to practice: the realization that his body was basically made up of the food he’d been eating, and so he … 
  7. Nostalgia for Suffering
     … And seeing them as these five activities, seeing the different forms of suffering you have in these terms, helps to give you some distance from them. After all, that’s a large part of discernment: learning to see things as separate. Because when you look at the categories, they’re all pretty broad, especially fabrication. All kinds of things come under the category of … 
  8. Pleasure & Pain
     … Discernment comes in three forms: the discernment you learn from other people — the things you hear, the things you read — that’s one level; the things you think through — that’s another level; and then finally the things you learn by trying to develop mindfulness, alertness, and other good qualities of the mind. The third level is where the insight really becomes your own … 
  9. Fighting off Ignorance
     … You’ve simply taken your different sensations—the form sensations of warmth, solidity, movement, and coolness—and you’ve mixed them up with the pain. This is especially bad if you glom the solidity together with the pain, so that the pain feels solid. It’s as if you couldn’t feel your knee without the pain, or you couldn’t focus on the … 
  10. Self-starting
     … That’s the second form of right effort. The third form is if there are skillful states that you would like, and they haven’t arisen, you do what you can to foster them. There’s an interesting passage in Ajaan Chah. I was translating one of his Dhamma talks recently. As you know, Ajaan Chah is usually characterized as having one teaching: Let … 
  11. Booster Stages
     … In fact it actually forms part of the first level of jhana: directed thought and evaluation. There’s a passage where the Buddha says that if you find that the way you’re focusing on the body makes you anxious, irritable, uncomfortable in the present, try to focus on a theme that inspires you, that gives rise to a sense of clarity, confidence in … 
  12. A Room of Your Own
     … and not worry about who reads it—in other words, a place where you can inspect your mind in all honesty and not have to engage in denial or in other forms of covering up things from yourself. To do that, there has to be a sense of comfort, a sense of ease. That’s why we work with the breath, because otherwise coming … 
  13. A Refuge in Quiescence
     … When anything comes up in your meditation that you’re not sure about—it might be a unusual form of knowledge, an intuition, whatever, and you’re not sure about it—just stay with the knower. That’s the quiescent part of just being aware, right here. Then just watch whatever has arisen as it passes. No matter what, you’ll be safe. And … 
  14. Collecting Your Tools
     … When are they useful? Where are they useful? We hear that views are one of the mental fermentations, views are one of the forms of attachment. Well, does this mean we shouldn’t have views? Well, no, how could anyone live without views? If you try to deny that you have views, you’re stuck in denial. The views go underground where you can … 
  15. Working Ourselves Free
     … Then work on the subtler breath sensations in the body, patterns of tension, say, in the chest, in the shoulders, the back, the legs, the hips, because that’s a form of breath energy as well. Think of everything relaxing all the way out to the pores. Every pore. Think of the body as a big sponge, with all the pores open, and see … 
  16. Feed the Hungry Mind
     … Karaṇīya, “what should be done.” There’s a verb form that ends in -attabbo, -attabbaṃ: katabbo, this “should be done.” Dātabbo, this “should be given.” Sikkhitabbaṃ, this “should be trained in.” Should, should should. The Buddha treats us as active beings. He’s simply teaching us how to act in new ways, so that eventually we get to a place where we don’t … 
  17. Immediate Knowledge
     … This is where intention and feeling and attention and perception—all those factors of name and form—all meet. Even though you may not be able to parse them out yet, at least you know that all the important things you need to know are right here. Try to make this “right here” the basis of whatever other certainty you’re going to try … 
  18. Seclusion
     … So if you catch the mind leaning into the future, wondering what’s next, or leaning back into the past, longing for what’s gone, remember that that’s a form of non-seclusion as well. The Buddha once said that if the mind is without anticipation of the future, without longing after the past, it’s freed up a lot of its most … 
  19. Patience & Hope
     … In his own case, in his awakening he thought back many, many lifetimes, thousands and thousands of eons—thousands and thousands of universes, actually, forming and then falling away—back so far that he said that the beginning point is not only unknowable, it’s also inconceivable. In the course of that long, long time, you’ve probably done lots of things, you’ve … 
  20. Staying Grounded
     … If bubbles do form, you don’t have to follow them. After all, the Buddha doesn’t say not to think at all, just don’t go inhabiting your thought worlds. Try to gain some control over your thoughts. And especially watch out for the thoughts that tend to get involved in conflict—the thoughts that begin with, “I am the thinker.” So, what … 
  21. Appropriate Attention
     … All these forms of craving are causes of suffering, but as the Buddha said, we go everywhere with them. They’re our companions. We think they’re our friends. Ajaan Suwat used to make the comment that we have everything backwards. We think that craving is our friend and that suffering is our enemy. But if craving is our friend, it’s the kind … 
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